The Sinister World of Looksmaxxing
  February 17, 2026 Happy Monduesday Meteor readers, Anyone else spend all of yesterday binge-watching and then emotionally recovering from the America’s Next Top Model docuseries? I saw all three episodes, but you know what I didn’t see? Anything resembling accountability from Tyra Banks. We were all rooting for you, ma’am. In today’s newsletter, we look at a troubling Senate race in Kentucky. Plus, we ask what everyone’s been asking the last few weeks: what the hell is looksmaxxing? Writemaxxing, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONSo it can get worse: As we all know and appreciate, Senator Mitch McConnell is not running for re-election this year. When he announced his retirement last year, it filled me with peace to know that his specter will no longer haunt the halls of government. But that peace is gone after watching a campaign commercial for Andy Barr, one of the three men in Kentucky vying to be the Republican candidate for McConnell’s seat. The ad is what the young people call ragebait—intentionally designed to make people angry with statements like, “DEI stands for dumb evil indoctrination.” And at the midpoint of Barr’s commercial, he says, “It’s not a sin to be white, it’s not against the law to be male, and it shouldn’t be disqualifying to be a Christian.” Those are words with a history, journalist Judd Legum points out. “The language used by Barr is a variation of the phrase ‘It’s OK to be white,’” Legum writes. The phrase, abbreviated to IOTBW, dates back to 2017 when it spread on the “notoriously racist message board” 4chan. The term went on to be adopted by neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups, who put up flyers with the term. One would like to imagine that proudly updating a neo-Nazi slogan for a political campaign would be disqualifying. (Although, to be fair, posing in front of a Confederate flag and weakening the Voting Rights Act didn’t end McConnell’s career.) It turns out Barr is just part of a trio of horrifying candidates in a campaign that has become “a racialized cage match revolving around convincing White people which candidate hates Black people the most,” according to professor Ricky L. Jones in the Courier Journal. “It’s a disgusting spectacle to behold.” The other two Republican candidates—former Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron and businessman Nate Morris—have both played up their anti-DEI bona fides and subtly vowed to protect white Kentuckians and stay loyal to Donald Trump. Cameron, who is Black, even went so far as to claim that systemic racism is a myth, and that he was proof. (Early polling from the New York Times shows that Cameron is ahead of his colleagues and will go up against either Charles Booker, a progressive who has lost two previous primaries, or the more moderate Pamela Stevenson, who was the first Black woman to lead a legislative caucus in the Kentucky General Assembly.) So what’s the moral here? It can, in fact, get worse than Mitch McConnell. Now’s a great time to check out who’s running against guys like these in your own state’s midterms and decide how the next few years of our collective lives are going to go. AND: 
 Three Questions About…LooksmaxxingMegan Reynolds explains what the menfolk are up to now. A MAN! (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Bubbling up recently from the putrid waters of the manosphere is a thing called “looksmaxxing.” On the surface, looksmaxxing is a language dodge by men who want to achieve a perfect aesthetic without having to use feminine terms like “plastic surgery” or “nose job.” Harmless, right? Probably not if legacy media is devoting so much ink to introducing us to someone named Clavicular—a man I’d happily go my whole life knowing nothing about. To understand the latest trend clogging our FYPs, I turned to author and chronically online elder millennial Megan Reynolds, who has a talent for demystifying internet rabbit holes. What exactly is “looksmaxxing” and how did this particular corner of the internet claw its way into the light? Looksmaxxing is the act of “optimizing” your appearance towards the traditional aesthetics of masculinity, via a wide range of methods, from working out and eating well to various surgeries, steroids, hair transplants, and the like. For the men who participate in this subculture, the focus is generally on the skin, muscles, and, for some reason, the jawline. (Think Gaston from Beauty and the Beast or the phrase “a jaw that could cut glass.”) A looksmaxxer’s final form is a Chad—an archetypal “hot” man, the strapping and handsome stereotype of masculinity, idolized by incels. Chads get Stacys, which, as you may have surmised, are essentially their female counterparts—attractive, sexually available blondes. Looksmaxxing has been around since the 2010s, in the more red-pill, incel-adjacent corners of the internet, where distorted and dangerous thinking flourishes. We can thank TikTok and social media in general for the fact that we’re even discussing what this is today. If we want to look for a deeper answer [of why it has become more mainstream], I think looksmaxxing is also about a sense of control, especially in a world where young men feel like they’re in a state of crisis that is seemingly unsolvable, born out of the ballyhoo around the loneliness epidemic. [Also] I would say that Scott Galloway, the NYU professor/pundit/podcast host, who recently published the book “Notes on Being a Man,” is stoking the fires here just a touch, too. In an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s podcast in December 2025, Galloway suggests that when looking for someone to have sex with, women are looking for men who can “signal resources” (i.e. make money), and while he is careful to not say outright that women want a man who is physically attractive, that is certainly implied. “I worry we are literally evolving a new breed of asexual, asocial male,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2025. Galloway’s entire thing is that men are here to “protect, provide, and procreate.” To my mind, presenting this rhetoric to a group of people who are feeling a bit left out in the first place is pouring gasoline on the fire.  A MAN WHO SPENT A MONTH TRYING TO BE MORE MAN, FOLLOWING THE GUIDELINES OF LOOKSMAXXING. TO BE CLEAR, THIS PERSON IS NOT CLAVICULAR, WHO WE ARE DECLINING TO SHOW BECAUSE HE DOES NOT DESERVE THIS MUCH ATTENTION FROM WOMEN. When we think about the manosphere, we think about guys out in the wild, chopping wood, trying to assert dominance over all things through strength. But “looksmaxxing” sounds like the antithesis of that. Are the bros embracing a wider scope of masculinity, or is it really all a net negative? It’d be nice if this was a gesture towards enlightenment, but what lies at the heart of looksmaxxing is desire—specifically, the men who are trying to mold themselves into the aesthetically ideal men are doing so in order to attract women. The manosphere is powered by the fumes of men who, like many, many people on earth, have faced rejection, either romantically, professionally or otherwise. What’s sinister about this is not rejection, as that is a simple fact of life, but the entitlement that men feel when faced with rejection. And it’s what people do with that entitlement that makes this entire situation alarming, to say the least. The TikToker who is sort of resurrecting looksmaxxing is a 20-year-old named Clavicular who associates with the likes of Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. What’s the connection between a sharp jawline and the right? Ugly guys can be fascists too, no? If we must trace the connection between the far-right and a jaw that could cut glass, we have to go back to the Nazis and their demented and incorrect views on beauty and the aesthetic ideal. The ideal Aryan man is blonde, blue-eyed, and muscular, the perfect specimen of physical fitness, absent any trace of racial ambiguity. Fascism, too, is about control—and if looksmaxxing is a means of seizing control over the one thing a young man actually can control, then it makes sense that these movements are inherently connected. It’s important to note, too, that Clavicular is doing what he does for the clicks—attention, in this economy, can lead to fame, financial gain. He and his compatriots are just a flash in the pan, but the real issue here is the thinking behind it.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
